'Equality audits' and six months' paternity leave: Britain's economy can't take much more meddling

The world, or at least the world of "elf 'n safety", human rights, and mindless intrusion into our private lives, is going mad. That is, unless it hasn't already fallen into insanity. One of my sons recently told me of the experience of one of his colleagues who visited the headquarters of a perfectly normal business. On arrival, he was given a five-minute briefing on health and safety, which included a warning that if he was offered tea or coffee it might be hot and "could cause injury if spilled", as well as advice on climbing stairs safely and the need to hold on to the bannisters.

Now it emerges that public sector bodies will have to spend £30 million a year on "equality audits", which will be conducted by equality officers and other ne'er do wells who will compile questionnaires asking employees about their gender, sexuality, religion and disabilities so that they can be aware of the race, disabilities, gender, age, sexual orientation and religion of their staff.

I hope that most employees will tell their employers to get stuffed, and declare such intrusions to be a breach of their human rights and demand compensation.

When one of my outstanding (but mischievous) officials told me thirty years ago that he thought he might start an employment agency to supply employers with black, disabled, transexual lesbian single parents, so that they could tick all the required boxes with only one employee, we both thought it was joke in bad taste. I am not so sure now.

Nor can we blame it all on "Europe", malign as the oppressive power of the EU and the European Court of Human Rights has been. Much of this puerile nonsense springs from Westminster. The Harriet Harman Equality Act made a welcome consolidation of some sensible legislation on disability but its central purpose of imposing equality, not of opportunity but of outcome, was misconceived. The Coalition has scrapped some, but not enough of it.

Now, sadly, it is instead proposing to load more burdens on employers already hard pushed to contain costs and stay competitive.

In another sweetener for the Lib-Dems, fathers will be given new rights to parental leave. Pity the poor employer of five or ten people with two or three away on parental leave at the same time, unable to replace them as he could not fire the replacement worker if the mother decided to return to work.

Nor does it just hit the private sector. I know a 68-year-old nurse whose NHS employer has pleaded with her not to retire. The unit on which she works has four nurses away on maternity leave. One had only returned from a previous spell of leave for a week before announcing that she was again pregnant. To help out on her unit that 68-year-old recently worked a day shift ending at 4.00pm followed by a night shift starting at 10.00pm

There can be little doubt that these burdens are now becoming more than our economy can bear. The way to create jobs is to make it easier and more profitable for employers to offer jobs, to get on with the Duncan Smith reforms to make it less profitable to live on welfare and more profitable to work. After that a ban on immigration from outside the EU apart from skilled workers coming to specific jobs worth more than £50,000 a year would increase opportunities for our own people.

Heard it all before? I am sure you have. It was what Conservatives said before the went to bed with the Lib-Dems.

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Let me make one think absolutely clear: I have no part of selecting, or editing comments on this blog, nor do I want any part of it. It would be quite wrong for me to have any influence over that matter. Having said that I would say that I found what was happening in the way in which comments were posted or moved around has made it much more difficult to respond to individual posts and I hope I will be forgiven for not taking up all too many of the thousand plus comments that were made.

The second point I would make is that I had to rely on the Daily Telegraph front page story about the speech which Baroness Warsi intended to make that evening. It is a pity that she did not ask my comments or advice on her text, but then no Minister in the Lib-Dem Coalition has ever done that. Had she done so the impact it made might have been very different. I would have certainly advised her to emphasise that it is for Muslims living here to adapt to our society rather than the other way around, and that both Catholics and Protestants have in the past suffered real discrimination in our past history.

I hope that consideration of the reaction to the Telegraph story may have helped concentrate her mind. To be fair to her, in the text subsequently published on her website there are some good lines, and I append a few.

"Muslim communities must speak out against those who promote violence."

"Muslim men and women must make it clear that any hatred towards others is wrong."

"….do not stand on the sidelines, but step forward and help to lead a progressive united fight (against hatred and violence)."

I should tell Uncertain Trumpet that I am not "annoyed that Baroness Warsi did not accuse Christians of bigotry". How he managed to think that I cannot imagine. But then as North Wester pointed out he also confuses hostility to Islam with hostility to Muslims.

I think it was trosser who said that he was "'shocked that I do not give my successor scrupulous public loyalty", rather forgetting that loyalty is a two-way street and I am not enamoured of being described as either nasty or toxic by the Modernisers. Indeed he also forgets that when I was introduced into the Lords I gave an oath of loyalty to the Crown, not the leader for the time being of a political party.

The over-excited rogermurray clark declared that my talk of finding common ground with British Muslims is "appeasement". I think he does not understand the concept of common ground, which is in my mind that on which two people are content to stand.

I am grateful to those of you who sent good wishes to my wife, among them darkseid who advised me not to feed the trolls by reverting too often to the problems posed by our Muslim minority.

Perhaps the most interesting comment was from expat in turkey who observed that the comments of Baroness Warsi "feed anti Christian and Jew discussions at dinner tables here".

Lastly, let me assure you all that I have no sympathy for Westerners in Muslim countries who flagrently offend against the social norms of their host countries. We cannot have it both ways.